When once a week is too much e-mail

In the drive to get customers to shop and buy more, online retailers want to bring them back to the site often, and e-mail campaigns are one way to attempt to get them there. But in their desire to get shoppers to return, it can be easy for some to overestimate how often customers really want to be on the site, according to Bridget Fahrland, executive creative director at e-commerce design and services provider consultants Fry Inc.

“This is not to say we’re against promotions, but sometimes, there is really a little loss of perspective as to how often somebody needs to be coming to a site,” she says. “There’s a retailer I buy from online that I get an e-mail from once a week, But I don’t want to hear from them once a week – I don’t buy home décor items once a week.”

When e-mails come from a merchant that often, the business managers may be pursuing their agenda, but the communication isn’t as relevant to the customer, adds Dana Hawes-Davis, Fry’s director of Fry’s user experience group. An answer to balancing relevancy and frequency is segmentation – segmenting segment e-mail outreach according to registered customer preferences, past purchasing or browsing behavior, and other factors that make the e-mail’s content more or less relevant to different individuals or groups of customers.

“One of the great things about where we are with the web today is that you can do a lot more around personalization through what you can learn through web analytics, adds Hawes-Davis.